Agenda: Intersectionality (Crenshaw & Puar)
Pitch workshop next week: bring (1) quesitons/best practices; (2) draft of your pitch
Group Discussion of blog posts and questions
A little background: Crenshaw’s article is THE definitive article on “intersectionality,” which has now come to be a foundational concept even in popular feminisms. It was published in 1991. But a lot has changed since 1991. And there have been many critical-race feminist critics of “intersectionality” (e.g., Paula Moya, Michael Hames-Garcia, Puar).
Is “intersectionality” the best concept or discourse to describe the phenomenon it is intended to capture (i.e., the interlocking nature of identity-based oppressions)?
Why would the lived experience of otherwise privileged subjects (e.g., white women, black men) SEEM to indicate that social identities are separable, not “intersectional”?
Are accounts/critiques of “intersectionality” primarily modeled on the relationship between race and gender? Why? How does this focus/limit the concept/discourse? (or: how is our understanding of how identities relate predicated on the relationships among the two cases through which we study it?)
Has intersectionality, especially the “traffic metaphor” model of intersectionality, been interpreted as a classically liberal answer to the question of how interlocking identity-based systems of oppression relate? That is to say: has “intersectionality” been interpreted and used as a way to reinforce the generally liberal notion of race, gender, etc., as properties of bodies or individual characteristics, rather than as systems of social organization? Does intersectionality, as a concept, necessarily work this ways? Are there other, non-liberal ways of understanding intersectionality?
Puar argues that intersectionality has been interpreted such that “gender” is taken as the central term with which everything else “intersects,” thus ironically privileging gender as the primary mode of oppression. While this may or may not be an accurate description of scholarship, is this a necessary feature of the concept of intersectionality? Does it HAVE to center gender (or race) as the primary form of difference with which everything else intersects (or not)?
Another of Puar’s criticisms is that “intersectionality” centers a Modernist/humanist subject (a coherent self that is rational, autonomous, and so on), whereas contemporary technologies of racialization, gendering, queering, etc.--these work at the micro- and macro-subjective level (e.g., on our data, or across populations). Relatedly, she argues that intersectionality has been interpreted to be primarily about individual identity, not hegemonic institutions or structures. Especially w reference to the Crenshaw, are Puar’s criticisms of the concept of intersectionality accurate?
“the subject is divided up into subhuman particles of knowledge that nevertheless exceed the boundaries of the body, yet it is also multiply splayed through, across, and between intersecting and overlapping populations” (Puar TA 12).
How might “assemblages” help us think about the micro- and macro-levels of perception that biopoltiics uses but that can be seen by “normal” human eyes?
Traditionally, vision perceives images, appearances, and representations—a subject perceives an object. Puar argues that superpanopticism follows a different “economy of sight,” one without either “subjects” or “objects.” Instead, we have “assemblage[s] of subindividual capacities” that are “visualized” in the way that data is visualized in a new media environment. The point is not to see objects, but relationships among types of info. Word clouds are a good example of data visualization and how it differs from “the visual” re-presentation of content. Word clouds use algorithms to analyze a text—a book, a blog post, every post in a blog, etc.—and find the most frequently occurring words in that text. The most commonly used terms are then put in a graphic, their relative frequency expressed in terms of size—frequently used words are larger, less-commonly used words are smaller. You can find many word clouds at the website wordle.com. Here, you will see that the words in the images are not signifiers pointing to some signified content; they are graphic expressions of relationships among the verbal elements of a defined text. The word cloud expresses relationships among data (word frequency).